Fujifilm has released updated firmware for its GFX Eterna 55 medium format cinema camera, and set out a roadmap of additional updates that will follow over the next year.

Firmware v1.1 promises improved stability and usability but future updates include support for desqueezed previews of additional anamorphic lens ratios, improved SDI and HMDI latency, with LANC control and variable electronic ND arriving later.

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The Godox iT32 is a pocketable, $80 flash. And it essentially sweeps away all the hurdles that stood in the way of me using flash.

I suspect I’m not alone in having found the cost of flash systems off-putting, when I first started photography. I’d scrabbled together enough money for a camera body with a nice kit zoom and immediately turned my attention to additional lenses. Flash was always the next thing on my list. And, two decades later, it still is.

You learn early on that flashes are most effective, creatively when they’re positioned away from the camera, but this invokes all the costs of remote triggers and off-board flashes, or being limited by the length of cables, because I’d bought an entry-level DSLR that couldn’t act as a flash commander, and I didn’t feel confident enough to start with manual, rather than TTL-controlled flash.

Mitchell Clark

The iT32 solves that off-camera problem because it connects to your camera via a small, hotshoe-mounted radio-frequency controller. The cost of this controller? between $20 and $34, depending on which brand of camera you use.

The X5 controller slots into your camera’s hotshoe and the iT32 attaches magnetically to the controller. Or you can disconnect the flash and fire it remotely. The flash itself communicates using Godox’s own communication protocol and can pair with any X5 controller, providing TTL compatibility whatever brand camera you own. It also means that you can buy a single iT32 and make it work even if you have cameras from more than one brand.

Richard Butler

*Godox says Canon cameras with multi-interface hotshoes should use an adapter to mount the X5 C. It makes a “X5 Cm” version for these newer cameras but has limited its sales to China.

The X5 can only control flashes operating in a single group, so you can’t use it as the basis of a complex multi-group setup, but the iT32 itself can operate in different groups, so will still be usable, if you decide to expand your setup, later.

So far, I’ve just been using the X5 and iT32 combination and have found it to be a really low-risk place to start experimenting with flash. It’s a genuinely small unit, that makes it easy to keep with me. It has a guide number of 18m, so it’s not especially powerful, but it’s enough of a step up from any camera’s built-in flash that, especially combined with the ability to use off-camera, is enough to make it worth carrying around.

In-use

Mitchel Clark

For such a small unit, the iT32 has a surprising number of control points. There’s a power/flash test button, a Set button and a Menu button, along with a dial on the side, used for quick control. But the iT32’s small rear screen is also touch-sensitive, so it’s really quick to operate, rather than requiring odd combinations of button pressing and dial turns.

To turn the unit on you hold the power/test button for two seconds then scroll the control dial upwards to confirm that it’s not just pressed against something in your bag.

You can access the menu by pressing the Menu button or swiping down on the screen. In the menu you’ll find options for controlling the modelling lamp on the front of the flash, a control for switching between TTL, Manual and multi-flash (strobe) modes, as well as deciding whether the flash is in on-camera mode, sender or receiver.

Mitchel Clark

The iT32 automatically switches to receiver mode when you detach it from the on-camera X5, so you don’t need to give most of this much thought.

In use you can set exposure compensation by turning the dial on the side of the flash, by swiping left or right on the touchscreen or, when the iT32 is working remotely away from the base, by pressing the small + and – buttons on the back of the X5 controller.

If you have a pair of iT32s you can your their controls to set them to different manual flash values (or flash exposure comp values if in TTL mode). You can still use the X5 to increase and decrease these values remotely, but any increase or decrease will be applied to both flashes, so you can’t remotely adjust them independently, as you would in a proper system of grouped flashes.

Mitchel Clark

When working handheld, I found the touchscreen to be very sensitive and the control dial very easy to jog, so tended to make use of the ‘Lock’ function in the menu, to stop myself accidentally changing the flash settings. Once lock is engaged, you need to hold ‘Set’ for two seconds to re-activate the controls.

The iT32 has its own, built-in battery, so you don’t need to hunt around for a fresh set of AAs all the time. It recharges over its USB-C socket, which is also used for updating firmware for both the flash and the X5. The X5 unit has its own battery, which charges up when connected to the iT32. You can check the battery level on the menu of the flash, when it’s connected, or long-press the – button, where it will communicate its charge level with between zero and four flashes of its tiny red LED.

Richard Butler

Generally, getting started with the iT32 is simplicity itself. The two units pair with one another when physically connected, switching the flash to the correct camera brand’s protocol, and then auto switches between on- and off-camera operation. It’s only two swipes on the touchscreen to manually engage receiver mode, if you power the flash on again later and don’t want to have to physically re-connect them each time.

As you use the setup more, it’s worth scanning through the manual, as there are some differences between camera brands about how to access modes such as high-speed sync and rear curtain flash sync, but there’s nothing that a complete novice should find off-putting at all.

Overall, though, I found the X5 / iT32 pairing to be a remarkably cost-effective way to access the world of flash photography. And, significantly, the realm of off-board flash. This simple, sub-$100 set overcame pretty much all of my previous concerns about cost, about compatibility and around batteries, leaving me with no excuse.

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The Sony RX10 V arrived just before a trip I had planned to San Francisco, giving me some more interesting / less familiar shooting opportunities, the chance to play with an extremely long lens, and a lesson in how hard it is to re-create Todd Walker’s famous 1964 photo of California Street.

I made sure to grab some low-light photos as well as some trams, sunshine and marine-layer gloom.

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The Sony RX10 V is an update to the company’s long-zoom large-sensor compact. It’s built around a 20MP stacked Type 1 (116mm²) sensor and a 24-600mm equiv, F2.4-4.0 stabilized zoom.

It’s a long-zoom ‘compact’ whose newfound processing power means it can shoot a range of subjects from landscapes to wildlife and maybe even a little sport. We’d be tempted to make the comparison to a Swiss Army knife, only the RX10 is far from pocketable.

Key specifications

• 20MP Type-1 (116mm²) stacked CMOS sensor
• 24-600mm equiv. F2.4-4.0 lens
• Up to 30fps shooting
• 4K up to 120p with crop (60p full width) in 10-bit
• 3.68M dot EVF
• 1.62M dot tilting rear LCD
• UHS-II SD card slot
• 630 shot/charge battery life rating

The RX10 V will be available in early August with a recommended price of $2,300. This is exactly in line with the US consumer price index inflation rate applied to the $1700 launch price of the RX10 IV, nine years ago. To use a different benchmark, it’s cheaper, relative to the a7 V and that camera’s peers, than the Mark IV was, relative to its contemporary a7 model.

Index

• What’s new
• Body and handling
• In use
• Video
• Initial impressions
• Sample gallery
• Specifications
• Press release

What’s new

It’s been eight years since the RX10 IV and Sony has made big steps forward in both technology and ergonomics in the meantime: the RX10 V benefits from both.

On the technology side, the RX10 V gains the Bionz XR processor and “AI processing unit” from the previous generation of Alpha cameras. This brings the full range of subject recognition modes, including birds, animals, cars, planes and the “human pose estimation” system that is designed to recognise people-shaped things in the scene, even when the face or eyes aren’t visible, to help the camera continue to track the same subject.

The added processing power allows the RX10 V to shoot at up to 30 frames per second with a blackout free viewfinder. You also gain the Speed boost function that lets you temporarily engage a faster (or slower) shooting mode, when you hold a customized button down, but you don’t gain the pre-capture function.

Autofocus has come a long way in the nine years since the previous RX10 was released, and the new model feels like a thoroughly modern camera. The other area of significant improvement over the same period is video, and the RX10 V is a bit step forward in that regard, too, with a host of Sony’s latest options including, significantly, the ability to capture 10-bit and H.265 footage, both of which make it more pleasant to work with.

Sony says it’s the same lens as on the RX10 IV but CIPA standards for reporting focal length have apparently changed in the meantime, meaning it’s quoted as a 9.1-210mm zoom, rather than the 8.8-220mm figures printed on the side of the previous two models. We suspect the figures now quoted are the literal focal lengths, rather than the effective focal lengths after corrections has been applied. The end result is the same, though: a 24-600mm equiv range with an F2.4-4.0 maximum aperture and in-lens stabilization.

24mm equiv 600mm equiv.

It’s hard to get your head round just how much flexibility a 24-600mm lens gives you until you use it. There are cameras that offer even more range, but all of them are based on much smaller sensors, so you pay a price in terms of image quality, if any survives the heat haze.

The lens has a built-in shutter which can go as fast as 1/1000th of a second at wide apertures, and 1/2000 sec at F8 and slower. This is great for flash, as you can sync up to those maximum speeds but quickly becomes limiting in bright light. You can switch the camera to e-shutter mode which, with a rolling shutter rate of 15.7ms (1/64sec) is still pretty fast, but this requires you to switch to the lossy compressed Raw format. There’s no auto mode to let you use mechanical shutter up to its limit, then e-shutter beyond that.

Body and handling

Richard Butler

The RX10 V is a substantial camera but that’s to be expected for something trying to deliver a 24-600mm equivalent zoom range. It’s been a long time since we handled an RX10 IV but the grip shape seems improved, offering a sturdy grip on the dense, polycarbonate body.

There’s no front dial, the logic presumably being that you’ll use your index finger for operating the zoom rocker. This means the two command dials on the rear shoulder are both operated with your thumb. There’s also a rather fiddly dial on the rear plate of the camera but thankfully, with the provision of two customizable command dials and an aperture ring, there’s rarely need to use it (it’s not used in photo mode, by default).

Richard Butler

Unlike recent Sony cameras, the RX10 V has a 10Gbps USB-C socket for fast data transfer but then retains the USB Micro B ‘Multi’ socket for attaching external accessories. This can no longer be used for charging the camera, reducing its usefulness to being an accessory port.

The RX10 V still uses a single SD card but the interface now uses the slightly newer UHS-II standard, rather than the UHS-I slot on the previous model. This is quick enough to accommodate the 600Mbps (75MB/s) data rate required for 4K/60 video capture with All-I compression.

Viewfinder

Richard Butler

The viewfinde gets an upgrade to 3.68M dots (1280 x 960px), which is a decent step up from its predecessor. The resolution drops a little if you engage the high refresh rate mode, and battery life drops, too, but whichever mode you choose, the resolution is maintained, even when using C-AF, so you don’t get the potentially distracting drop in detail when you half-press the shutter.

Screen

The screen is also refreshed, with the Mark V using a 1.62M dot (900 x 600px) screen that matches the sensor’s aspect ratio, rather than the 4:3, 800 x 600px panel on the previous model. The screen is still mounted on a tilt up/down cradle, which gives a decent level of flexibility but isn’t well suited to portrait orientation shooting.

Battery

Richard Butler

Other than the improved autofocus, perhaps the biggest change on the Mark V is the move to the much larger NP-FZ100 battery. This is the 16.4Wh battery that has powered the various a7 models for the past nine years. It has a capacity more than twice that of the FW50 battery used in previous RX10 cameras, giving much better battery life in a way that seems appropriate for a camera so likely to be used for travel and long shoots outdoors.

In use

When you first start up the camera, you’re confronted with a very simple, compact-camera display, with five large touchscreen buttons arrayed down both sides of the screen. This ends up feeling somewhat nostalgic, having not encountered a mainstream point-and-shoot for some time, and rather at odds with the more Alpha-styled controls and main menu.

Anyone not wanting to use touchscreen buttons, or wanting a less cluttered display can remove them (the option to do so is under Touch Operation / Touch Panel Settings, rather than with the display options in Operation Customize).

With this done, the RX10 V feels a lot like an Alpha-series camera, with the new menus representing a big improvement over the ones in the previous models. It’s not without its foibles but for the most part it’s well grouped and organized, and with a little customization of the Fn menu and custom buttons, you can minimize your need to visit it.

The RX10 V has the same issue as other Sony cameras in terms of a couple of incompatible settings: you’ll need to disengage Raw and switch to HEIF format before you can engage the camera’s HLG Stills mode to shoot true HDR images, and you’ll have to switch your Raw format if you want to engage the electronic shutter mode. All of which leaves the risk that you forget to switch back.

Richard Butler

Also, somewhat disappointingly for such a travel-friendly camera, Sony remains the only major brand not to offer some kind of in-camera Raw conversion. So if you take a nice shot but want to tweak the white balance, color mode or DRO level before sharing it, tough luck, you’ll just have to messily hack the JPEG around on your phone.

There’s a lot to like, though. The dials and joystick give a good sense of direct control, letting you feel you have direct command over the camera’s really rather impressive capabilities. It has its limits, though: it will try to keep focusing if you zoom with the ring around the lens (you can’t use the zoom rocker), but it definitely struggles, which can limit some sports or action shooting. But the ability to quicky zoom with the rocker under your index finger and fine-tune the framing with the lens ring helps keep the power zoom feeling pretty engaging.

Video

The previous RX10 V’s video topped-out at 4K/30, despite the use of a fast, stacked CMOS sensor. The Mark V pushes way beyond this, with the option to shoot 4K/120 with a significant 1.38x crop or oversampled 4K/60 from the full width of the sensor. As you’d expect from a modern camera, this can all be done in 10-bit, making Log, and in particular, the more ambitious S-Log3 curve, much more usable.

Richard Butler

But video improvements over the past nearly decade go further than speed. The RX10 V lets you shoot in the attractive, S-Cinetone color mode and it lets you upload LUTs for previewing your preferred color grade, or to burn directly into the footage. It has Sony’s Auto Framing mode that identifies a subject, punches in and follows them around, upscaling the footage and giving a camera operator dynamism to what are actually locked-off shots. There’s also the Active Mode IS that corrects a wider range of movement, available at up to 4K/60.

Then, on the audio side of things, the RX10 V can capture up to four-channel audio, if you attach an accessory to its multi-interface connectors in the hotshoe. A 72mm filter thread allows you to attach ND filters as needed.

Above all of this, though, the RX10 V’s video also benefits from its improved autofocus system, which is much more tenacious and dependable in terms of subject tracking, especially if your subject is of a type the camera has been trained to recognize.

Initial impressions

Richard Butler

It’s been nine years since the last RX10 model was released and, although things have been pretty quiet on the compact front, the rest of camera technology and performance have continued to make advances. Much like watching a young relative you rarely get to see grow up through a series of infrequent visits, the prolonged gap really makes you notice how much has changed in the meantime.

The RX10 V is a dramatically more advanced camera than its predecessor: faster to focus and much more dependable at subject tracking. The menus and ergonomics have come a long way, too, and its video capabilities are leagues ahead of where the RX10 IV had brought us to.

I’m not generally a fan of long-zoom cameras, as I’d usually prioritize compactness over that additional reach that I rarely find myself wanting to use. But the enhanced AF performance and speed capture add a lot to what was already a camera with a strong following. They vastly expand what the RX10 V can do, and the changes to the controls and battery are significant benefits, too.

Unlike the recent L10, that doubling of battery capacity hasn’t led to much of a change in body size, and it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway, on a body so dominated by that vast lens.

There can be a few delays, here and there, waiting for the lens to initialize, and it was disappointing to have to swap shutter modes (and Raw filetype) or stop down when hitting the 1/1000 sec limit of the mechanical shutter. But overall I’ve found the RX10 V to be a pleasant travel companion whose lens constantly challenged me to think of photos that I couldn’t otherwise take.

Whether that makes it worth $2300 is for each individual to decide, but it’s striking to get to see what nearly a decade’s worth of improvements, delivered all in one go, look like.

Sample gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page ). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

Sony DSC-RX10 V specifications

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Mitchell Clark

The much larger battery in the L10 takes up almost 1/3rd of the body’s volume, so it’s no surprise that the camera is larger than the LX100 models.

The Panasonic L10 is appreciably larger than the LX100 models that came before it. This has caused some people to dismiss it as no longer making sense, once it’s comparable to the size of the smallest ILCs and their retractable lenses.

It’s also brought into question our use of the term “compact camera” which we’ve historically used for cameras with built-in lenses, but that’s an issue for another day.

Handling the L10, it quickly becomes apparent why it’s so much larger, with the new, much larger battery taking up approximately 1/3rd of the body space. This is because the L10 uses a battery with over twice the capacity of the one used in the LX100s: 15.8Wh, rather than 7.4.

The camera has also become a little deeper, because the screen is now articulated, rather than fixed (something we found frustrating on cameras with such a wide-angle lens). The L10 also has a separate door for its SD card, rather than it slotting in behind the battery, though sadly the door is so close to the tripod socket that this separation doesn’t bring any particular benefit.

Having traveled with the camera for a while, I found myself appreciating those two changes more than I was put off by the loss of pocketability. With a wrist-strap, it’s small enough to comfortably carry all day, but now with the battery life to sustain it over prolonged periods, and the ability to turn the rear screen in for protection, when stuffing it into a camera bag or carry-on luggage.

Does it have as much flexibility as an ILC? No, but its lens is brighter (in both absolute and equivalent terms) than ILC + kit lens pairings that come close to its size. And, like the Fujifilm X100 cameras, that are the same height and width as the L10, there’s a certain appeal to a self-contained device that does one particular thing, rather than a camera that could, theoretically, do anything. If you don’t see that appeal, then it’s not the L10, or its size, you dislike, it’s compact/fixed-lens cameras.

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Richard Butler

When we wrote our review of the Panasonic L10, we tried to make sure we put the studio comparison into context . For mirrorless cameras and DSLRs we use good prime lenses, stopped-down to the point that their performance is reliably excellent: zoom lenses and, in particular, the downsized, retractable zoom lenses in compact cameras, can’t match up to this standard. As a result, compacts don’t look quite as impressive.

Our test scene lets you compare images in incredibly fine detail, revealing differences that you wouldn’t see in most real-world situations: they exist but that doesn’t mean they matter. That’s exactly why we also post a gallery of real-world sample images so that you can relate the things you see in the studio scene to their photographic impact.

We’d gone through our usual processes for compact cameras: carefully align, shoot a series of images, compare to cameras we’d expect to perform similarly, then do it again at a different focal length, to make sure we were representing the camera fairly.

However, we still saw some concerns expressed that we were testing a “faulty” or sub-standard copy. Just to be certain, we requested another L10, to see whether we’d get a significantly different result.

Test and retest

It didn’t. With the first copy, we found that the 75mm setting looked better than the 50mm we’d used on the LX100 cameras. The difference was much smaller on the second copy. Both copies could be a touch sharper at the center at 75mm whereas 50mm equiv was less sharp at the center, more consistent out to the corners , which is presumably why we chose it for the LX100s.

Multiple focus attempts, using both manual focus and autofocus, appear to suggest that a lot of the softness in the corners is a result of curvature of field: a non-flat focus field, meaning it’s not possible to get the whole of the chart in focus at the same time. The images with the sharpest center focus had worse looking corners than the images with slightly miss-focused center .

Ultimately we were able to shoot some images that are sharper at the center than the ones displayed in our image comparison tool, but they have visibly less sharp corners . The second copy of the camera also appears less consistent, with what appears to be slight decentering sometimes affecting the top left corner.

The images between the two cameras are similar enough (decentering aside) that we don’t think we can get consistently better images from the second copy than the ones already in the scene. Those images already exhibit aliasing – a sign that the lens is resolving detail beyond the level the sensor’s resolution can accurately capture – suggesting the lens is doing a good job. You just need to consider the context of how finely you’re scrutinizing them and how impossibly the high the standards set by good, prime lenses are.

Was it worth the effort?

We re-tested the L10 because we want to make sure our image comparison tool shows all the cameras in it in as fair a light as possible. And if that means re-doing some of the work and re-checking our assumptions to ensure our standards are maintained, then it’s worth doing.

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Richard Butler

The launch event for the Leica SL3-P included not only the chance to get trackside at the famous Nürburgring motor racing circuit and a studio setup by fashion photographer Pat Domingo but also the presence of famed photographer Steve McCurry.

This meant I found myself in the frankly ridiculous position of asking to shoot a portrait of one of the world’s most famous portrait photographers, as well as the more familiar challenge of trying to find a unique shot in a pre-staged studio scenario.

Included in the gallery are a handful of shots taken with the new 50mm F1.4 and 100mm F2.8 Macro lenses.

Here’s Leica SL3-P (and I) got on:

Leica SL3-P sample gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page ). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

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